There is no independent chooser, but choosing is happening

[Excerpt from Unachievable]

Choices are happening all the time. Billions, trillions of them. At an organelle level within a cell there appear to be something like ‘choices’ about what micro-functions will be carried out, how and when. Then there are choices at a cellular level, for example, stem cells choosing what they will become.

Choices at tissue level dictate, for example, how the connective tissue in the skin reacts to a change in temperature. At organ level, there are choices which, for example, control how the tissue groups that make up the lungs will respond to smoke in the atmosphere. Moving up to the organ system, choices specify, for example, how the brain, spinal cord and sensory organs of the nervous system will react to noise.

Then, of course, there are choices at the organism level of the human being, for example, whether to stand up, walk, talk, sit down. These choices being made at the ‘I’ level look as though they are being independently made. We might say, “Well some are subconscious but the others I make myself.” But how? Even the choices that seem to be independently made are the outcome of this entire chain of happenings and all of this is a function of what has previously taken place.

All choices are being witnessed, not made by the conscious mind. For the mind to recognise the logic of this is an enormous step towards the recognition that the concept of a separate self that makes independent decisions is just that– a concept. It has no existence in reality. There is no independent chooser, but choosing is happening.